Much of the problem that fatwallet is having is due to late notice. From what I can see, their lawyers still haven't seen the notice.
I don't know about other jurisdictions, but in BC, a notice served after 4:30 isn't considered delivered until after 8:00am the next business day... I think it's intended to prevent stupidity like this. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Best Buy timed their email to arrive after the lawyers had gone home.
There's nothing like the fear of the unknown to get people to do stupid things.
Hey, I was nit-picking a point, and I recognized it, (notice the 'anal retentive' prefix) needless to say, I wasn't expecting the torrent of response (not complaining -- just surprised).
I agree that 'evil' is something of an over-arching word, and we would be well served by more specific terms. People like Bush prefer 'evil' because it is so vague that it is open to repeated re-definition -- especially as each previous definition is exposed as fraudulent.
And -- no, the less psycho implementations of Islam are not hard on women and repressive. Islam was, in it's time, revolutionary in terms of giving women more rights and freedoms than they had at the time.
I dated a girl who had converted to Islam. She didn't seem very repressed by it (I'd say that she had more issues about being bi and islamic than being female).
In North America, we have a very recent history of oppressing women almost as much as the worst of Islam. My mother became an Optometrist in the late '50s, and I remember reading letters where she had to deal with the seriously mysogenic heads of the optometry association who wanted to deny her her license despite glowing reports from her examiners. It really wasn't until the last generation or so that women were expected to do anything more than raise babies and be subservient to their husbands.
It's not Islam that opresses people, it's the various cultures. There are still portions of the US bible belt, where you'd have a very hard time with your 'good christian' neighbours if they found out that you were running autopr0n. There are, in fact, states where public nudity is can still (in theory) get you life in prison.
For more on that point, drop by TERA (Topfree Equal Rights Assoc.) for more examples.
In the other direction, I have one older friend who describes secretaries being assigned to sleep with prominent customers as if it was part of their job description.
Less than a century ago, women were thrown in jail for having the temerity to demand the right to vote, and a law suit was taken to the privy council (back then above Canada's supreme court) to
have women declared 'persons'.
(
more on google.
)
He thought he was doing what he needed to to unite a racially and ethnically and religiously divided nation. He didn't know what he was doing was wrong, and he didn't know it wouldn't work.
Keeping a nation together just for the purposes of personal power is not good. It's selfish. Part of the way that he managed to get himself surrounded by yes-men included things like feeding one of his generals (live) to a pair of dobbermans while the rest of his staff watched. After seeing something like that, wouldn't you do whatever it took to keep that kind of power-drunk maniac from turning on you?
(Mass)
Murder, rape, torture... At best, Saddam didn't care about how evil he was being. I don't think that that lessens the level of his evil.
In my world, the "truly believe what they're doing" argument applies to the actual suicide bombers. They, at least, believe in what they're doing enough to kill themselves for the cause. Deluded and/or misguided? yes. Evil? no.
Notice that, while calling for it, neither Saddam nor Bin Ladin has ever strapped explosives to themselves.
(This argument would also apply to Bush jr. who enrolled in the National Guard to avoid Vietnam service, didn't even complete that tour of duty and then grew up to send soldiers to their deaths to further his political/financial goals.)
Al-Quaida shows signs of being far more interested in infamy and killing than defending Islam. Bin Ladin is using Islam as an excuse for his reign of terror. Muslims are often the victims of his terror, and his actions are often against the well-known precepts of Islam (and, I'm sure, a lot of the lesser-known).
Some of the people following him (including most of the suicide bombers) do honestly believe the diatribe that Bin-Ladin spouts. Them, I would classify as naive, deluded and/or less evil. Bin Ladin, on the other hand, shows every sign of understanding the evil that he's perpetrating.
That having been said, Saddam has killed more people than Bin-Ladin over a longer period of time, so I'd agree that he's more evil... BIn Ladin has simply killed more Westerners than Saddam. (not more evil -- just more infamous).
Would you consider the Bombing of Hiroshima to be terrorism?
terrorism
. n : the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence)
against civilians in order to attain goals that are
political or religious or ideological in nature; this is
done through intimindation or coercion or instilling fear
[syn: act of terrorism, terrorist act]
(kdict -- wordnet)
The bombing of Hiroshima would classify as terrorism.
Note that first use of nuclear weapons has since been declared illegal.
In truth, most modern war is an act of terrorism. The purpose of war is (usually) to get the other side to surrender.. Killing people (usually limited to enemy combatants by rules of both war and religion) is simply the most common way of achieving that surrender.
Saddam gassed the Kurds, and he is a Sunni. I'm so tired of people saying "He gassed his own people" wa wa.
As the leader of a country, he is responsible for all of the people of the country. Whether they are related or not, they are 'his' people. If he wants to evade responsibility for them, then he should let them split off into a separate country. Still. even as citizens of a different country, it would have still been a war crime to gass entire cities (and a crime against humanity in either case).
I mean they were in the middle of uprising or whatever.
If you follow that logic, then the British government would be justified gassing Irish Catholics (and Bush might even be justified in gassing democrats). Even in war, there are rules which our society has drawn up. In either case, he has violated the rules of humanity which were codified after WW2..
I do not agree. The poster was being ironic; the only people who say Hussein is evil are Bush and his cronies, usually as a backpeddling justification for murdering his kids.
The 70 virgins comment was a reference to the (I think) 27 virgins that Islam offers to people who martyr themselves in defence of the religion. This was the reward promised to suicide bombers (including the 9/11 hijackers).
On the other hand, Islam also forbids both suicide and the killing of non-combatants (women, children, the elderly, etc.), so I'd expect that the closest to the 27 virgins that these misguided souls are going to get in the Islamic afterlife would be a gaggle of demons poking their barbed tails up some very surprised butts.
As for Saddam not being evil:
WRT being evil, I'd say it's what would horrify 95% of the population, while most of the other 5% might not understand why it horrifies people, but they know it does. The evil are those who could care less. Now, the small percentage who are oblivious to the horror that their actions cause would qualify as evil for me. on the other hand, (the) most evil people are those who know that their actions horrify most people and embark on them for that reason.
Saddam fits firmly in the last group.
The argument over Saddam was not whether he was evil.. it was whether the US had the right to demand an invasion of Iraq on Bush's timetable -- especially when you consider that Saddam got much (if not most) of his WMD technology and equipment from the US (with US government assistance, even).
Pornography is evil now? Wow, I'm right up there with Saddam Hussen. But where the hell are my 70 virgins!?
The problem I have with your post, is that it implictly claims that Islam is evil. Christianity has been used to goad people into vile killings Just like Islam has (cf: Yugoslavia, germany, etc.). What's evil is perverting a good religion to goad people into doing things that are completely repugnant to the teachings of that religion.
The rules that you specified seem completely reasonable to me. You're not specifically barring them from doing anything, but you're giving rules that allow you to make comment on what they're doing and (hopefully) provide useful guidance.
One question I'd hand you, though: If you saw that your 15 year old was watching porn, would
say that (s)he should never surf again, or would you
take it as a good opportunity to talk about sex, relationships and the porn industry?
If your answer is 1, then it makes sense that your kids are violating your rules because you really have a bunch of rules that you're just not telling them about.
If your answer is 2, then you need to do some confidence building for your kids... In the meantime, however, I think that you need to generate an enforcement method... Walking away with their computer for a couple of hours (or days) just might just do the job.
Relaxing your rules because your kids are breaking the ones you have seems like a bad precedent, unless they can offer a strong argument as to why your current rules are inapporpriate. (I don't see any)
On the other hand, don't come down too hard on them. Remember: they're teenagers, and a certain ammount of rebellion is to be expected. Your job as a parent isn't to prevent rebellion (you'd be better off trying to get a good grip on Jello[tm]), but to shape the direction they go with that rebellion.
Personally, I think that the best thing for the court to do would be to say "we don't think you have valid claim. Come back when have a real chance of enforcing a seizure order against
the probeif you win.
acording to my quick calculations, a 0.8km rock flying at 10km/s would have about 3600megatons worth of kinetic energy (presuming that it was about the density of water -- ymmv).
Given that it would have about a 2/3 probability of hitting water, I'm exepecting some seriously impressed surfers that day.
When Myrias computers was talking aout building a 1000 processor super computer back in 1982, I joked that it might be able to generate real-time holograms and pop popcorn at the same time..
Law definition: A false representation of a matter of fact which is intended to deceive another.
If that was all that was required for fraud, then we should be charging every spammer in the US with 1 million counts of fraud each (per day). There many types of fraud, but -- as far as I know -- common criminal fraud requires an intent of material gain. (IANAL, either).
The obvious problem is that you'd be spending all your time responding to spammers.
No. If we have enough people doing this, it only takes each person responding to one spam a day. see my article on Kuro5hin for my original incarnation of this idea.
I need to add memory to my machine to handle the extra load caused by filtering the 300+ spams I get a day. Even then I still need to vette it to catch the occasional false positive (it's rare but still annoying). If spending a portion of that time each day to proactively make life hell for the people generating this garbage has some hope of stalling it's logrithmic rise, then I'm willing to take it on.
Even if it take spammers 1/10th the time to process my counter spam than it takes me to generate it, we have the force of numbers behind us (more than a million to one). It doesn't take much to hopefully overwhelm them.
Oh, you mean fraud? Isn't that a bit illegal? What if, by some freak of nature random chance you actually charge someone?
They're supposed to check the name and the billing address. The probability of getting a number that's actually assigned to someone is about 1 in 1000. The probability of randomly getting the expiry date adds another 30-1 to that. Now multiply in the probability of having a correct name, not to mention having something that looks even vaguely like the right address and city. You'd have beter odds trying to win the lottery.
Fraud implies the intent to obtain goods or services thru lying. There is absolutely no intent to recieve anything here.
The intent here with CC numbers is to sabot up their credit card processing. For spammers that just collect info (Mortage brokers, etc.) , the intent is to poison their pool to the point of unusability -- In either case, attacking their business model.
Also, people are generally lazy, so it won't happen in the volumes that would probably be necessary to make a dent.
There are thought to be only 100 professional spammers generating all of this garbage. If 0.1% of the net, on average, was to counter spam them each day, that would mean a couple thousand false positives for each spammer each day. Even that much would be enough to start making their life hell. It would only take a minute or less to counterspam a web site. That's less time than many of us now spend on our spam. If it starts to really make a dent on the number of spammers, and prevent the volume from growing even more, then I think it's worthwhile.
I currently still think that the best way to counter spam, right now, is to attack their business model. Right now, that consists of convincing poeple to actually start responding to spam by providing them with bogus infomation (random addresses and phone numbers, void (old or auto-generated) credit cards, etc/).
My idea is to drown them in bogus data so that they spend more time and money responding to bogus responses than they would with old-fashioned cold calling. It would also remove the advantage of increasing spamming volume because the spammer with the highest volume would also get the most garbage responses.
If you don't supply sll changes to the public, then your signatures and the public signatures wouldn't match. This would be an obvious indicator that something was wrong with the voting machines. Also: the vote machines would be built from the public sources..If you don't supply the sources to the public, then they won't go into the build.
Well, let's consider some scenarios: You're building your software for Governor Shrub's next election. If he wins this election, you get a $2Billion dollar deal to supply voting booths for the entire state at a 20% net profit. Your booths are going into a few key ridings.
The Scenarios:
Closed source:
Your source is proprietary. The state has access to the source code on a limited basis -- It will be audited by a software company owned by the son of Governor Shrub's best friend. (No conflict of interest here.. His company just happened to be the only one that knew to bid on the project!:-}). You may be able to sneak in a couple of 'maintenance' changes between the primary audit and the actual vote.
Open Source:
You own the source code, but anybody is allowed to download the source, examine it modify it and even run it on a test basis. This includes the geek friends of Senator Cal Wound -- your main competition in the election. Once the main audit was done, any further changes would take place in the form of source code patches which would also be publicly accessible.
The 'ballot' release will be compiled from the public source code with cryptographic signatures of both source and object being publicly posted.
If someone suggested that you might want to put in an easter egg that might allow someone to "nudge" the election in the right direction, and they were able to get you to seriously consider it, which of the two scenarios above would be most likely to disuade you from putting in the 'fix' as 'requested'?
, but closed source, if properly tested keeps people from being able to break in and mess with it unless they really try.
Properly tested, you could say the same thing about open sourced too. Being open source doesn't excuse software from testing. What it does is make a new kind of testing available... It allows the general public to hunt thru the software and look for possible holes. If reported these holes can be fixed.
Closed source allows a manufacturer to hide these same holes (and possibly use them). It also allows a manufacturer to install vote-time 'easter eggs' that would be almost impossible to test for without seeing the source.
1) We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes. If its not computerized, someone has to count them all.....
So you rather pay voting machine companies some 5'000$ per unit for a glorified Windows CE computer with an Access database.....
Let me think, for a minute: Thats $5000 at $20hour or about 250hours of balloting... let's estimate at 6 hours per ballot box (I've scrutineered before, and I'd say that that's a good spare space... )
That would give us 41 elections to cover the cost of the boxes (assuming no maintenence costs). At one election every 2 years, that means that it would take 80 years of hand counting to exceed the cost of those machines (presuming that they last that long).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about other jurisdictions, but in BC, a notice served after 4:30 isn't considered delivered until after 8:00am the next business day... I think it's intended to prevent stupidity like this. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Best Buy timed their email to arrive after the lawyers had gone home.
There's nothing like the fear of the unknown to get people to do stupid things.
That might affect whether or not you want to let them see your marks. :-)
I agree that 'evil' is something of an over-arching word, and we would be well served by more specific terms. People like Bush prefer 'evil' because it is so vague that it is open to repeated re-definition -- especially as each previous definition is exposed as fraudulent.
And -- no, the less psycho implementations of Islam are not hard on women and repressive. Islam was, in it's time, revolutionary in terms of giving women more rights and freedoms than they had at the time.
I dated a girl who had converted to Islam. She didn't seem very repressed by it (I'd say that she had more issues about being bi and islamic than being female).
In North America, we have a very recent history of oppressing women almost as much as the worst of Islam. My mother became an Optometrist in the late '50s, and I remember reading letters where she had to deal with the seriously mysogenic heads of the optometry association who wanted to deny her her license despite glowing reports from her examiners. It really wasn't until the last generation or so that women were expected to do anything more than raise babies and be subservient to their husbands.
It's not Islam that opresses people, it's the various cultures. There are still portions of the US bible belt, where you'd have a very hard time with your 'good christian' neighbours if they found out that you were running autopr0n. There are, in fact, states where public nudity is can still (in theory) get you life in prison.
For more on that point, drop by TERA (Topfree Equal Rights Assoc.) for more examples.
In the other direction, I have one older friend who describes secretaries being assigned to sleep with prominent customers as if it was part of their job description.
Less than a century ago, women were thrown in jail for having the temerity to demand the right to vote, and a law suit was taken to the privy council (back then above Canada's supreme court) to have women declared 'persons'. ( more on google. )
Keeping a nation together just for the purposes of personal power is not good. It's selfish. Part of the way that he managed to get himself surrounded by yes-men included things like feeding one of his generals (live) to a pair of dobbermans while the rest of his staff watched. After seeing something like that, wouldn't you do whatever it took to keep that kind of power-drunk maniac from turning on you?
(Mass) Murder, rape, torture... At best, Saddam didn't care about how evil he was being. I don't think that that lessens the level of his evil.
In my world, the "truly believe what they're doing" argument applies to the actual suicide bombers. They, at least, believe in what they're doing enough to kill themselves for the cause. Deluded and/or misguided? yes. Evil? no.
Notice that, while calling for it, neither Saddam nor Bin Ladin has ever strapped explosives to themselves. (This argument would also apply to Bush jr. who enrolled in the National Guard to avoid Vietnam service, didn't even complete that tour of duty and then grew up to send soldiers to their deaths to further his political/financial goals.)
Al-Quaida shows signs of being far more interested in infamy and killing than defending Islam. Bin Ladin is using Islam as an excuse for his reign of terror. Muslims are often the victims of his terror, and his actions are often against the well-known precepts of Islam (and, I'm sure, a lot of the lesser-known).
Some of the people following him (including most of the suicide bombers) do honestly believe the diatribe that Bin-Ladin spouts. Them, I would classify as naive, deluded and/or less evil. Bin Ladin, on the other hand, shows every sign of understanding the evil that he's perpetrating.
That having been said, Saddam has killed more people than Bin-Ladin over a longer period of time, so I'd agree that he's more evil... BIn Ladin has simply killed more Westerners than Saddam. (not more evil -- just more infamous).
As the leader of a country, he is responsible for all of the people of the country. Whether they are related or not, they are 'his' people. If he wants to evade responsibility for them, then he should let them split off into a separate country. Still. even as citizens of a different country, it would have still been a war crime to gass entire cities (and a crime against humanity in either case).
I mean they were in the middle of uprising or whatever.
If you follow that logic, then the British government would be justified gassing Irish Catholics (and Bush might even be justified in gassing democrats). Even in war, there are rules which our society has drawn up. In either case, he has violated the rules of humanity which were codified after WW2..
The 70 virgins comment was a reference to the (I think) 27 virgins that Islam offers to people who martyr themselves in defence of the religion. This was the reward promised to suicide bombers (including the 9/11 hijackers).
On the other hand, Islam also forbids both suicide and the killing of non-combatants (women, children, the elderly, etc.), so I'd expect that the closest to the 27 virgins that these misguided souls are going to get in the Islamic afterlife would be a gaggle of demons poking their barbed tails up some very surprised butts.
As for Saddam not being evil:
WRT being evil, I'd say it's what would horrify 95% of the population, while most of the other 5% might not understand why it horrifies people, but they know it does. The evil are those who could care less. Now, the small percentage who are oblivious to the horror that their actions cause would qualify as evil for me. on the other hand, (the) most evil people are those who know that their actions horrify most people and embark on them for that reason.
Saddam fits firmly in the last group.
The argument over Saddam was not whether he was evil.. it was whether the US had the right to demand an invasion of Iraq on Bush's timetable -- especially when you consider that Saddam got much (if not most) of his WMD technology and equipment from the US (with US government assistance, even).
The problem I have with your post, is that it implictly claims that Islam is evil. Christianity has been used to goad people into vile killings Just like Islam has (cf: Yugoslavia, germany, etc.). What's evil is perverting a good religion to goad people into doing things that are completely repugnant to the teachings of that religion.
(btw: Thanks for autopr0n....)
One question I'd hand you, though: If you saw that your 15 year old was watching porn, would
-
say that (s)he should never surf again, or would you
- take it as a good opportunity to talk about sex, relationships and the porn industry?
If your answer is 1, then it makes sense that your kids are violating your rules because you really have a bunch of rules that you're just not telling them about.If your answer is 2, then you need to do some confidence building for your kids... In the meantime, however, I think that you need to generate an enforcement method... Walking away with their computer for a couple of hours (or days) just might just do the job.
Relaxing your rules because your kids are breaking the ones you have seems like a bad precedent, unless they can offer a strong argument as to why your current rules are inapporpriate. (I don't see any)
On the other hand, don't come down too hard on them. Remember: they're teenagers, and a certain ammount of rebellion is to be expected. Your job as a parent isn't to prevent rebellion (you'd be better off trying to get a good grip on Jello[tm]), but to shape the direction they go with that rebellion.
Personally, I think that the best thing for the court to do would be to say "we don't think you have valid claim. Come back when have a real chance of enforcing a seizure order against the probeif you win.
Given that it would have about a 2/3 probability of hitting water, I'm exepecting some seriously impressed surfers that day.
Thank God! Now I can get rid of my aluminum-foil hardhat.
I know of Kant, but I haven't read him more than in a very cursory manner. My arrival at the Categorical Imperative was independent of Kant.
When Myrias computers was talking aout building a 1000 processor super computer back in 1982, I joked that it might be able to generate real-time holograms and pop popcorn at the same time..
If that was all that was required for fraud, then we should be charging every spammer in the US with 1 million counts of fraud each (per day). There many types of fraud, but -- as far as I know -- common criminal fraud requires an intent of material gain. (IANAL, either).
(Forgot to include the actual URL)
No. If we have enough people doing this, it only takes each person responding to one spam a day. see my article on Kuro5hin for my original incarnation of this idea.
I need to add memory to my machine to handle the extra load caused by filtering the 300+ spams I get a day. Even then I still need to vette it to catch the occasional false positive (it's rare but still annoying). If spending a portion of that time each day to proactively make life hell for the people generating this garbage has some hope of stalling it's logrithmic rise, then I'm willing to take it on.
Even if it take spammers 1/10th the time to process my counter spam than it takes me to generate it, we have the force of numbers behind us (more than a million to one). It doesn't take much to hopefully overwhelm them.
They're supposed to check the name and the billing address. The probability of getting a number that's actually assigned to someone is about 1 in 1000. The probability of randomly getting the expiry date adds another 30-1 to that. Now multiply in the probability of having a correct name, not to mention having something that looks even vaguely like the right address and city. You'd have beter odds trying to win the lottery.
Fraud implies the intent to obtain goods or services thru lying. There is absolutely no intent to recieve anything here.
The intent here with CC numbers is to sabot up their credit card processing. For spammers that just collect info (Mortage brokers, etc.) , the intent is to poison their pool to the point of unusability -- In either case, attacking their business model.
Also, people are generally lazy, so it won't happen in the volumes that would probably be necessary to make a dent.
There are thought to be only 100 professional spammers generating all of this garbage. If 0.1% of the net, on average, was to counter spam them each day, that would mean a couple thousand false positives for each spammer each day. Even that much would be enough to start making their life hell. It would only take a minute or less to counterspam a web site. That's less time than many of us now spend on our spam. If it starts to really make a dent on the number of spammers, and prevent the volume from growing even more, then I think it's worthwhile.
It seems to me like Cnet bought the domain-name, a non-compete promise and not much else.
My idea is to drown them in bogus data so that they spend more time and money responding to bogus responses than they would with old-fashioned cold calling. It would also remove the advantage of increasing spamming volume because the spammer with the highest volume would also get the most garbage responses.
Thoughts?
If you don't supply sll changes to the public, then your signatures and the public signatures wouldn't match. This would be an obvious indicator that something was wrong with the voting machines. Also: the vote machines would be built from the public sources..If you don't supply the sources to the public, then they won't go into the build.
The Scenarios:
-
Closed source:
- Open Source:
If someone suggested that you might want to put in an easter egg that might allow someone to "nudge" the election in the right direction, and they were able to get you to seriously consider it, which of the two scenarios above would be most likely to disuade you from putting in the 'fix' as 'requested'?Your source is proprietary. The state has access to the source code on a limited basis -- It will be audited by a software company owned by the son of Governor Shrub's best friend. (No conflict of interest here.. His company just happened to be the only one that knew to bid on the project!:-}). You may be able to sneak in a couple of 'maintenance' changes between the primary audit and the actual vote.
You own the source code, but anybody is allowed to download the source, examine it modify it and even run it on a test basis. This includes the geek friends of Senator Cal Wound -- your main competition in the election. Once the main audit was done, any further changes would take place in the form of source code patches which would also be publicly accessible.
The 'ballot' release will be compiled from the public source code with cryptographic signatures of both source and object being publicly posted.
Properly tested, you could say the same thing about open sourced too. Being open source doesn't excuse software from testing. What it does is make a new kind of testing available... It allows the general public to hunt thru the software and look for possible holes. If reported these holes can be fixed.
Closed source allows a manufacturer to hide these same holes (and possibly use them). It also allows a manufacturer to install vote-time 'easter eggs' that would be almost impossible to test for without seeing the source.
So you rather pay voting machine companies some 5'000$ per unit for a glorified Windows CE computer with an Access database.....
Let me think, for a minute: Thats $5000 at $20hour or about 250hours of balloting... let's estimate at 6 hours per ballot box (I've scrutineered before, and I'd say that that's a good spare space... ) That would give us 41 elections to cover the cost of the boxes (assuming no maintenence costs). At one election every 2 years, that means that it would take 80 years of hand counting to exceed the cost of those machines (presuming that they last that long).
Not a good investment.